Accustomed to a life of luxury and ease, upholding the Puritan doctrines in which he believed, and watching, it may be from afar, the widening breach between King and people, William Brereton had taken but little active interest in public affairs; but when the trumpet-blast of war sounded in his ears his courage, promptitude, and zeal were instantly aroused. Forced by the troublous times from the lethargy of security and passionless ease, he quickly evidenced the possession of qualities of which he had never given even a crude or ostentatious promise. In what he conceived to be the path of duty he was prodigal of his personal safety, and in that great struggle against prerogative no man was less mindful of the hardships and the dangers inseparable from a soldier's life. It was no boyish enthusiasm that led him to take down the spear and the arquebus from the ancestral wall and to don the armour of his forefathers; for, when he entered the arena of civil strife, he was verging upon forty years of age, and the blaze of youth had sunk into the burning fire of middle life. Noble was the idea he had set before him. To contend with the oppressor and to battle for right and justice was a high work. It is not our province to enter upon the merits of the great civil war of the seventeenth century; we reverence the principles of civil and religious truth for which the Puritans professed invincible attachment, but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that some of those who pleaded so loudly for conscience, and offered such uncompromising resistance to despotism, when they got the power into their own hands, instead of righting the wrongs of which they had complained, merely changed the venue and transferred a grinding social tyranny from the hand of one faction to that of another. As old Fuller, in his quaint way, observes, "they girt their own garment closest about the consciences of others." We can sympathise with the Puritanism of Brereton in the effort for the advance of civil and religious liberty and the purity of moral life, but we cannot sympathise with the Puritanism that manifested itself in fanatical excesses and the profane handling of things that ought to have been sacred, even to fanatics, if they believed in the cause for which they contended.